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After Villette, the Last Sketch, the Fragment of Emma; that fragment which Charlotte Brontë read to her husband not long before her death. All he said was, "The critics will accuse you of repetition."
The critics have fulfilled his cautious prophecy. The Fragment passed for one of those sad things of which the least said the better. It was settled that Charlotte Brontë had written herself out, that if she had lived she would have become more and more her own plagiarist. There is a middle-aged lady in Emma, presumably conceived on the lines of Mrs. Fairfax and Mrs. Pryor. There is a girls' school, which is only not Lowood because it is so obviously Roe Head or Dewsbury Moor. There is a schoolmistress with sandy hair and thin lips and a cold blue eye, recalling Madame Beck, though there the likeness ceases. And in that school, ill-treated by that schoolmistress, there is a little ugly, suffering, deserted child.
All this looks very much like repetition. But it does not shake my private belief that Emma is a fragment of what would have been as great a novel as Villette. There are indications. There is Mr. Ellin, who proves that Charlotte Brontë could create a live man of the finer sort, an unexploited masculine type with no earthly resemblance to Rochester or to Louis Moore or M. Paul. He is an unfinished sketch rather than a portrait, but a sketch that would not too shamefully have discredited Mr. Henry James. For there is a most modern fineness and subtlety in Emma; and, for all its sketchy incompleteness, a peculiar certainty of touch, an infallible sense of the significant action, the revealing gesture. With a splendid economy of means, scenes, passages, phrases, apparently slight, are charged with the most intense psychological suggestion. When Mr. Ellin, summoned on urgent business by Miss Wilcox, takes that preposterously long and leisurely round to get to her, you know what is passing in the mind of Mr. Ellin as well as if you had been told. In that brief scene between Mr. Ellin and the schoolmistress, you know as well as if you had been told, that Miss Wilcox has lost Mr. Ellin because of her unkindness to a child. When the child, Matilda Fitzgibbon, falls senseless, and Mr. Ellin gives his inarticulate cry and lifts her from the floor, the enigmatic man has revealed his innermost nature.
Now a fragment that can suggest all this with the smallest possible expenditure of phrases, is not a fragment that can be set aside. It is slight; but slightness that accomplishes so much is a sign of progress rather than of falling-off. We shall never know what happened to Matilda when Mr. Ellin took her from Miss Wilcox. We shall never know what happened to Mr. Ellin; but I confess that I am dying to know, and that I find it hard to forgive Mr. Nicholls for having killed them, so certain am I that they would have lived triumphantly if Charlotte Brontë had not married him.
Some of us will be profoundly indifferent to this issue; for Charlotte Brontë has no following in a certain school. She defies analysis. You cannot label her. What she has done is not "Realism", neither is it "Romance". She displeases both by her ambiguity and by her lack of form. She has no infallible dramatic instinct. Even in Villette she preserves some of her clumsiness, her crudity, her improbability. The progress of "the Novel" in our day is towards a perfection of form and a reality she never knew.
But "reality" is a large term; and, as for form, who cared about it in the fifties? As for improbability—as M. Dimnet says—she is not more improbable than Balzac.
And all these things, the ambiguity, the formlessness and the rest, she was gradually correcting as she advanced. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance and significance of her attainment in Villette; there has been so much confused thinking in the consecrated judgment of that novel. Villette owes its high place largely to its superior construction and technique; largely and primarily to Charlotte Brontë's progress towards the light, towards the world, towards the great undecorated reality. It is odd criticism that ignores the inevitable growth, the increasing vision and grasp, the whole indomitable advance of a great writer, and credits "experience" with the final masterpiece. As a result of this confusion Villette has been judged "final" in another sense. Yes, final—this novel that shows every sign and token of long maturing, long-enduring power. If Charlotte Brontë's critics had not hypnotized themselves by the perpetual reiteration of that word "experience", it would have been impossible for them, with the evidence of her work before them, to have believed that in Villette she had written herself out.
She was only just beginning.
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